


The Not-Diary of Seo Changbin

by starskies



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 2000s, Alternate Universe - Non-Famous, Angst, Character Study, Epistolary, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Bullying, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Pining, me writing a changjin fic: ok how can i make this about chan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23949076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starskies/pseuds/starskies
Summary: Hey! My name is Seo Changbin. If you’re reading this, that means that you’ve found my book. Let’s be clear straight off the bat — this is NOT a diary. This is a first-hand written account of the creation of the greatest underground rap scene in Seoul, and also a hopefully successful love story.Chan isn’t even the one to find the book. It’s Felix, actually, who lets himself into Chan's apartment one morning and dumps the thing on his lap. It’s half falling apart, the leather cover frayed badly enough that some of the pages are hanging on by a single thread. When he asks him what the hell it is, Felix just shrugs and says, “My Korean isn’t good enough.”
Relationships: Bang Chan & Seo Changbin, Hwang Hyunjin/Seo Changbin
Comments: 12
Kudos: 22





	The Not-Diary of Seo Changbin

**Author's Note:**

> hello! the idea for this fic came from ruth ozeki's novel "a tale for the time being," and i wrote it completely on a whim. just a warning that there are some mentions of suicide in a joking manner, in changbin's parts, plus bullying/homophobia which are mentioned in the tags. so please be aware of that! anyway i hope u enjoy~

_Changbin_

_May 3, 2002_

i.

Hey! My name is Seo Changbin. If you’re reading this, that means that you’ve found my book. Let’s be clear straight off the bat — this is NOT a diary. This is a first-hand written account of the creation of the greatest underground rap scene in Seoul, and also a hopefully successful love story.

I know what you’re thinking — rap? And romance? What the hell is this guy on? Well, dear reader, the literal answer to that is three extra shots of espresso in my 11 PM coffee, and the less literal answer is a wealth of overconfidence that will probably result in my early, accidental demise some day. 

I’m writing to you now from a second-floor cafe in Hongdae, at a little one-person table by the biggest window that’s the best spot in the cafe. I know this, because I have tried every table in this overpriced coffee shop at one point or another, and this table has the best balance of natural and artificial light, and sits at such an angle that you’re kind of hidden from the view of other tables while also being in a good position to people-watch out the window.

It’s less busy than usual tonight, probably because it’s a Sunday and everyone feels like they need to stay at home and mentally prepare themselves for the start of yet another work week where they’ll have to answer all their boss’s stupid questions with a smile and try not to throw themselves out the window of their office building.

I wonder if you, reading this, have a job like that. Do you spend all day typing away at a too-slow computer, wishing it was Friday already so you could go to the bars with your friends and get so smashed that you can forget for awhile just how much you hate your life? I hope not. I hope that you enjoy whatever it is you do, and don’t want to throw yourself out the window of your office building.

It feels like that’s the reality of every middle-class worker in our country, but maybe you don’t live like that. Maybe you found this book, then moved to America and are now reading my words on an LA beach, or in your New York studio apartment. Maybe you’re crazy rich, and reading about the lives of the little regular people entertains you.

Whatever it is, assuming you’re not some psycho murderer, I’m glad that you’ve found my book.

My friend Seungmin gave me this journal last year for my birthday, because he tries really hard to act all aloof and pretend to have no interest in me, but the truth is that he knows me better anyone. It’s such a nice journal, with a real leather cover and everything, so I’ve been waiting a while to figure out how I should use it. He probably thought that I would write lyrics in it, which is a good assumption, but I’m really very messy when I write new lyrics. Chicken scratch all over the page, eraser marks making a big smudgy mess. And since this is such a nice book, it didn’t seem right to dirty it up like that.

Finally, ten months later, I’ve decided on its use. I’m going to write something a little bit like the chronicles of my life, mostly focusing on the two currently most important aspects, aka my burgeoning rap career, and my struggles with young love. Maybe someday when I’m famous, this book will get typed up by someone who’s not me, and published to be sold in bookstores so that everyone can read about the early days of the greatest Korean rapper who ever lived. But that seems like a lot of pressure, so I’m going to write now assuming that it’s just you reading this.

Now you know a few things about me. My name, my life aspirations, maybe my birth month if you’re good at counting.

Since we only just met, and you can’t respond with information about yourself, I think it’s only fair if we take it slow from here. What would be the fun if I spilled all of my secrets in the first few pages? Besides, I don’t even know if you’ll keep reading the rest of this book. Maybe you’ll pick it up, read it for an hour or two because you’re bored and your husband or wife or cat isn’t paying enough attention to you, and then you’ll throw it under the bed or in the garbage and never think about it again.

That kinda hurts my feelings, y’know? To think that I’ll spend so much time writing my deepest innermost thoughts into this book, and you’d just throw it away. So let’s make a deal, okay? If you’ve read this far, and you don’t find the premise of my life story very interesting, you won’t just get rid of it. You’ll pass it on to a friend, or leave it in a coffee shop, or slip it onto the bookshelf at a library, so that someone else can find it. We don’t know each other, but do you think you could do me that favor? Please?

And now, if you’re reading _this,_ then you must be my real reader. Whether you’re the original guy who picked up this book, or his friend who he knows is into hip hop, or you just found this left on a chair at a PC bang, I’m glad that you’re here. If you’ve made it this far, you have to promise that you’ll finish reading it, however many pages I’ve been able to fill. Because books are meant to be finished, otherwise they can become angry spirits that will haunt the living until they get to finish telling their story. At least that’s what my mom told me when I was little, to get me to read the books I started in school. But whether it’s true or not, you have to swear that you’ll read this all.

If I try hard enough to reach through time and space, I can find your pinky to hook through mine, so that you can seal that promise to me. And now there’s no getting out of it! Let’s be sure to have a good time together, okay?

  
  
  


_Chan_

_February 24, 2010_

Chan never gave him a key.

No key, but it doesn’t matter because doors and locks could never keep out Felix Lee.

He shimmies the door open, which signals the break-in to Chan via the sticking noise that the bottom frame always makes against the threshold whether you open it properly or not. Chan is positive, as he usually is, that he locked the door last night, but Felix stills claims that he doesn’t know where Chan keeps the extra key (it’s taped to the top of the frame, not that difficult to figure out), and yet he hasn’t stopped to knock in at least a year.

It’s only 10am, so the intrusion comes unexpected and slightly jarring. Felix looks as awake now as he strides into Chan's kitchenette as he does at 3pm, which is the time he usually bumps his way into the apartment shortly after waking up.

This is unprecedented and therefore highly suspicious behavior, but before Chan can ask, there’s a dark brown weight being tossed into his lap.

“Uh, Felix?”

He watches him go up on his tippy toes to retrieve a bowl from the cabinet, then down to a spoon from the drawer, and finally duck his head into the refrigerator before he responds, “Yeah?”

“What is this?”

“A book.”

“Yeah, no shit. Where’d it come from, though?”

Felix reemerges from the fridge, one arm still cradling his spoon-in-bowl, the other wrapped around a gallon of 2% fat milk. He deposits them on the counter, then grabs the box of Lucky Charms out of the pantry. The following actions of pouring the cereal, and the milk, and shoving a tablespoon’s worth of wet marshmallows into his mouth make an unfortunately disgusting image as Felix proceeds to respond with his mouth half-full. 

“Remember the big discount sale I told you about, that they were having at Bondi Junction? We went by on Sunday morning and there were like, _massive_ piles of the most random shit you could find. Like people were just emptying out their garages and leaving all their old stuff there to sell for a few bucks. We spent about two hours combing through it because mum said not to come home until we found her a new hair dryer—remember, I told you last week how the cord split and started a mini fire on the bathroom mat?—but anyway, we finally found one for like five bucks-”

“Felix,” Chan interrupts. “The point?”

“Oh, yeah, well we ended up finding a bunch of other cool shit too. I got a couple of CDs real cheap, and my sister found that book. It had a little lock thing across the cover but no key, and she loves shit like that, so she brought it home and my dad was able to get it open. We realized it was in Korean, and she can like, only barely read hangeul, and my dad doesn’t give enough of a crap to translate the whole damn thing for her. So she got bored of it real quick and dumped it on me. Except, y’know, my Korean really isn’t much better than hers, so. Thought I’d give it to you.”

“And, what, you just assumed that I would wanna read—” He flips open the cover, to reveal a messy scrawl of handwriting in black ink, with a thick-lined title at the top. _“The Not-Diary of Seo Changbin?”_

Felix shrugs, looking like he doesn’t care either way if Chan reads it or not, despite his long-winded explanation of the book’s recent history since it had come into his possession.

“I mean, why not?”

Why not, indeed. Chan looks back down at the book in hopes that it will reveal to him some solid points on exactly _why not,_ but there’s not much to say from a cursory glance. He flips a few pages forward, to find more of the same scrawl. As he leafs farther in the book, the ink goes in and out, getting lighter at times and changing colors briefly before returning to black, evidence that it must’ve been written over an extended period of time. The words march evenly above the lines on the first page, but farther into the book they bunch and stretch like taffy in their haste to be put down. The handwriting isn’t exactly bad; it’s a little hard to read but it’s consistently hard to read, with the same syllables and letter combinations made in a uniformly illegible way.

“I mean, you can chuck it if you want, but I was kinda curious about what this dude is writing about. It says 2002, at the top of the first page?”

Chan turns back to the beginning, to see that Felix is right: it’s dated May 3, 2002. That was almost eight years ago. 

“Like, what were Koreans writing about all the way back in 2002?”

“The World Cup?” Chan suggests lightly, but Felix keeps speaking as if he hadn’t heard him.

“This is like, basically a piece of _history,_ Chan, it seems unethical to have it in your possession and not read it.”

“It was only written seven years ago, and how can you call it history when you don’t even know what it’s about? It could just be some 17 year old girl’s diary.”

“Are you saying that a 17 year old girl’s diary would _not_ count as history? Besides, you said it wasn’t a diary.”

“No, I’m saying that no matter what it is, I don’t have the time to read it anyway.”

Chan, unlike Felix, is a hardworking salaryman who has neither the freedom nor interest to get caught up in such trivial whims on a daily basis. He has a duty to tank water maintenance at the Sea Life Sydney Aquarium, a job he takes very seriously, and one which Felix is constantly forgetting every time he becomes even mildly bored.

Whether Chan has the time for it or not, Felix is always bringing him things: new, weird diets to try that involve stupid shit like not eating for a majority of the day; an emptied Gatorade bottle filled with tap water and the tadpoles that he found in the pond behind his house; strange, foreign fruit he’s never had before that smell like the most polluted corner of the bay and taste even worse.

No matter that he’s got practically 13,000 fish depending on him for their _lives_ (this is not actually true, he usually only works Dugong Island, Shark Valley, and the Great Barrier Reef, with the occasional trip to Penguin Expedition and Clownfish Garden when they’re short people), because Felix could never find anything to be more important than his tadpoles or the durian he found in Woolworths.

Chan glares at the dirty old journal, probably spreading all sorts of germs on his clean countertop, because he already knows that despite his protests, a scenario in which he _doesn’t_ end up reading it is incredibly unlikely.

Because for all his complaints, he’s still best friends with Felix after four years, and is it really fair to blame Felix when he has, without fail, followed him into the deep end of the stupid ideas pool every single time?

He pulls the book back toward him, at least aware of the fact that he lives as a human contradiction. He has a sink full of dishes that need to be washed, and Felix is still loudly chewing his cereal across from him, but maybe this Seo Changbin has something to say that’s actually worth reading. He won’t know until he looks.

The thing is, when he scans over the first page, it certainly reads like a 17 year old girl’s diary.

He hasn’t read a book in Korean since middle school, when his mom was still forcing him to go to the weekend classes that her friend taught at the community center. They never had enough copies of books for everyone, so Chan would have to stay after class and spend his Saturday afternoon reading _The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong_ over his friend’s shoulder, telling him every time he finished the page so his friend could flip it. The most reading he’s really done since then has been online articles and forums.

This book puts his abilities to the test, because every other sentence uses slang that he’s never seen before, because he didn’t grow up in Korea, and because it’s about eight years old. He could try looking them up on the computer, or ask his parents, but it seems likely that they would understand this even less than he does.

Despite the roadblocks, it doesn’t take a fluently literate person to tell that this guy is like, kinda crazy though. Chan can pick up on that pretty easily. When Felix dumps his bowl in the sink and asks him what it’s about so far, how is he supposed to respond? 

  
  
  
  


_Changbin_

_May 3, 2002_

ii.

So, I was rereading all that stuff I wrote before, and I realized that there’s a bit of a problem.

I said that I wanted to tell you about the romance in my life, right?

I don’t know what you were picturing when I said that; maybe some beautiful girl, my best friend since childhood who I’ve been hopelessly in love with since we first shared some chocolate mushroom candies together on the swing set, but I’ve never quite been able to push our relationship out of the _friends_ category. Maybe a hot foreign girl who I met in a club and spent one incredible night with, before she had to go back to Germany, or Taiwan, and now I’m on a mad search to find her because I never even got her name.

Well, if you’re thinking anything close to one of those, you can stop it now.

The main character of my love story is a boy named Hwang Hyunjin.

I know — wait, _what!?_ I already promised to read your story to the end, Changbin, and you’re only gonna tell me _now_ that this is some pervy creepo erotica novel??

Yes. Except, no — this isn’t an erotica, unless you get your dick wet from reading about LOVE. There are a lot of uninformed people out there, even still in this great, progressive year of 2002, who think that men who are attracted to other men are just stinky little perverts. If you’re one of those people, allow me to be the first to inform you that this is utterly false. I’m a gay man, but I’m not a stinky little pervert and I don’t associate with any stinky little perverts either.

I’ve spent the better part of the past year in love with Hwang Hyunjin, and there’s nothing creepy or disgusting about it. Since, as you said, you’ve already promised to read the rest of my book, I think that you should put away any inhibitions you have about this, and just enjoy the beautiful love story I’m about to slap you with, which you might just learn a thing or two from.

Okay, now we got that out of the way. From now on, I’m going to pretend that you’re totally okay with it, because you probably are since no less than _fate_ has led you to this book, and it wouldn’t have chosen you if you weren’t a super cool person who thinks gay people are awesome.

Sweet. 

iii.

Originally, I kinda wanted to focus on writing about my rap career in this notebook, with only a sprinkling here and there about my love life. But now, I’m sitting here, and we just had kind of a moment there when I told you about the whole gay thing, which means you know even more of my secrets now, and I’m getting a serious pull toward writing more about the romance side of the story.

Because I’m pretty hot stuff on the online hip hop forum that I frequent the most, and can get attention on there any time I want. But I don’t get to talk to anyone about my unrequited love hardly at all. I mean, I tell my friend Seungmin about it, but I’m pretty sure that he’s not really listening when I do. But _you_ on the other hand HAVE to listen, because you made that promise to me and all that you’d read everything, and it’s pretty uncool to go back on promises you make either to yourself or someone else. Then people just think that you’re flaky, and unreliable.

So is that alright? If I talk about my love problems first, and get to the scene-establishing stuff later?

I’m just going to assume that you said _yes of course Changbin, please tell me all about your ongoing attempt to get some dick!!_

Well, alright then! 

iv.

The story of me and Hwang Hyunjin requires some backstory first. That way you can really understand the full context of what I’m working with, and can make up your own educated opinions about it.

I don’t know if you prefer coffee, or tea, or hot cocoa, or none of the above, but whatever’s your comforting drink of choice, make yourself a glass and strap in somewhere comfortable, because we’re about to take a long road trip down memory lane.

Our first, and perhaps most important stop, is my middle school. 

I was averagely popular in school. I enjoyed grade school, about as much as you can in our country where they go and put a couple hundred kids who can’t even drive or drink yet under one roof and drown them in so much work that they’re all a half step away from killing themselves at any given moment. Which means there’s a pretty toxic vibe surrounding school y’know? I enjoyed it though, because at some point in middle school I decided that all of that competitiveness and wanting-to-kill-yourself energy was really not it, and I would be a lot happier if I just stopped feeding into it.

So I scraped by in school with grades that would land somewhere in the very-good-to-decent range in any other place, but in Korea put me toward the bottom of the spectrum. My school wasn’t one of those fancy ones that popped up in Seoul within the past decade and has a full gym and bathroom faucets that work, but it also wasn’t the worst. We didn’t have any wildly rich or smart kids, just a couple of regular rich and regular smart kids. So those few kids looked down on those of us who weren’t crazy wealthy and didn’t care much about their scores, but the rest of my class didn’t care that I wasn’t selling my soul in a violent blood sacrifice every night just for slightly higher marks on tests. I spent _some_ of my time studying, but most of it hanging out with my friends or practicing my rapping. I was a lot happier that way, and I still don’t regret it to this day.

Anyway, while school wasn’t really the worst for me, I learned later on that it could be pretty terrible for other people, even beyond the whole academic-pressure-that-makes-you-wanna-die thing.

So, my middle school had this tradition, where they held this weird ceremony on the first day of school for the first years. It was like, a really really old school, and apparently this was a thing they’d been doing since it was rebuilt in the ‘60s or whatever. They'd pull all the first year students out of class at the end of the day, put them in the auditorium, and force them to listen to the principal drone on about cooperation and unity for almost an hour. Then, everyone got a piece of paper with a number on it and we had to go and find whoever had our matching number, which took a stupidly long time because there were like a hundred kids.

My partner was a kid named Hwang Hyunjin. I’m kinda embarrassed to say that, even though this was our first meeting, I don’t remember too much about it. I thought he was tall, and had really really nice skin, which was especially impressive at a time when all the other boys in our year were being hit upside the head with puberty and still hadn’t learned that washing your face was a thing. But other than that, I just remember the teachers herding us into a line and giving us this strip of cloth that we had to tie on either end to the cloths of the kids next to us. You know, as a symbol of unity or whatever. It was really lame.

It was especially lame, because our school didn’t know shit about unity.

After that first day, I didn’t really talk to Hyunjin again on account of us being in different classes. I don’t know if that was something the universe did because we weren’t meant to be friends yet, or if it was just being an asshole, but even though I had a ton of friends back then, Hyunjin’s situation was totally different.

See, Hyunjin was pretty popular at the start of middle school too, just not in the same way that I was. Because here’s the thing — I think I’m pretty hot. But Hyunjin, he’s like, _unbelievably_ hot. Like makes you at least triple take when you walk by him on the street. Like, there’s no way he’s some normal fuckin’ kid, he’s gotta be a celebrity. That kind of unbelievably hot.

So back then, I was always popular because I’m funny and nice, not because I’m super attractive, and Hyunjin was popular because he’s super attractive, not because he’s funny and nice. Which he is. Funny and nice. He’s _so_ funny and nice, except those idiot kids in our year never got to figure that out because they never bothered to be real friends with him.

Kids can be really cruel. I don’t know who you are or where you’re from, but I know I don’t actually have to tell you that, because that’s a universal truth of our species.

When someone has something that makes them better than everyone else, everyone wants to be friends with them, like in the hopes that their better-ness will rub off on anyone who gets close enough. Obviously it doesn’t actually work like that, which any person with brain cells should be able to piece together, but most everyone we went to school with was stupid so that didn’t stop them from trying to use Hyunjin to look cooler themselves.

And when they _finally_ realized that they couldn’t get Hyunjin’s natural hot-ness through osmosis, they turned on him, like, if _we_ can’t have it, then we’re not gonna let you be cool because of it. Which is super fucked up.

Hyunjin told me later on that he really believed the guys in his class actually liked him for a good few months at first. That’s a long time to spend thinking that you’re really friends with someone. Like, maybe you take longer to warm up to people, but I get attached real quickly. Which, you could probably tell, from me spilling some of my biggest secrets to you after like 4 pages of knowing each other. But the point is, I think that Hyunjin was probably really hurt when he found out it was all a lie, and that even though those kids were laughing at his jokes, they were _really_ just laughing at him and didn’t actually think he was very cool at all. I would be super pissed off if someone did that to me, but Hyunjin is pretty sensitive so I think it mostly made him really sad. And it wasn’t just one person, but practically his whole class.

Once he found out that everyone was actually making fun of him in a not-friendly-banter way, he stopped being friends with them. Which makes sense, except that that left him with no friends, and no reason for those kids to keep putting up a front that they liked him, and could instead just pick on him directly.

Sometimes I feel guilty about all of that going on and not doing anything, but to be honest I didn’t know much about it at the time. It was this distant gossip, that sometimes caught on the summer breeze and drifted in through the door to our classroom, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. There’d be whispers every once in a while, like — _did you hear what happened in the lunchroom—_ and _—the mess they made of his uniform—_ and _—heard he came in late, again—_ but that was it. Even the kids in my class knew about Hwang Hyunjin, but not as more than that one student who looks like an idol, and seems to be the enemy of everyone else in class 2B.

I’m not going to tell you many of the things that they did to him, because a lot of them were seriously awful, and I don’t want to make you too upset so early on. To be honest, this story is going to get worse before it gets better — I’m a little bit worried that I’ve overloaded you already, so I’m going to take a break here. My hand is seriously killing me, and the barista keeps giving me dirty looks because I haven’t ordered anything else in a while.

I didn’t mean to end up writing so much, but it felt like the words were just spilling out! I didn’t know I had this much in me. It’s probably because I started talking about Hyunjin — I’ll always have an infinite amount of words to say about him. Anyway, it’s starting to get really late now, and I don’t want Seungmin to worry about when I’ll be getting home, so I should go.

I hope that you have a good day, or a good night. Try not to think about me _too_ much, okay?

**Author's Note:**

> i have absolutely no clue where this fic is going. hopefully it's somewhere fun lol


End file.
